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It’s 1921 and as the rest of Europe is rebuilding itself following the First World War, Russia is midway through its own revolution. It’s not the best of times to be an aristocrat, with justice typically meted out to the nobility via the barrel of a gun.
It’s amid this turmoil and social upheaval that we meet the luxuriantly moustachioed Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov (Ewan McGregor) in Paramount+’s new drama A Gentleman in Moscow.
In the opening episode, Rostov is hauled before a Bolshevik tribunal as an enemy of the people. “Occupation?” demands the chairman. “It’s not the business of gentlemen to have occupations,” retorts Rostov amiably, seemingly unconcerned that his life hangs in the balance. Only his authorship of a 1913 poem interpreted as calling for revolution saves him.
He is spared a bullet in the head and is instead placed under house arrest in Moscow’s posh Hotel Metropol for the rest of his life. If he ever sets foot outside, he will be shot. Having lost his country estate, Rostov had already been living in the Metropol but now he is turfed out of his opulent suite and billeted in a mean little attic room, reached by a precipitous, rickety staircase. “That day, the Count thought his life was over,” a narrator (whose identity would be a spoiler to reveal) tells us, “but in truth, it was only the beginning.”
Rostov refuses to let the bastards grind him down. He greets every slight with gracious courtesy, every setback with disarming equanimity. A cheerful disposition and an easy wit are his weapons of defiance as we follow him through the years and then the decades of his incarceration. Rostov is a timely reminder that however awful a country’s rulers, its people are perhaps a different proposition.
He is befriended by a lonely little girl, Nina (Alexa Goodall, Leah Balmforth when older). He has romantic trysts with a slinky film star (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, married to McGregor in real life). He is harassed by the sinister secret policeman Glebnikov (Johnny Harris) and makes an enemy of the loathsome zealot Leplevsky (John Heffernan). We learn details of his connection to his socialist friend Mishka (Fehinti Balogun) through flashbacks.
Outside the hotel, the great tide of history surges throughout Russia, completely transforming it. Counter-revolutionaries are summarily executed in the street, famine sweeps away millions, brutal despot is replaced by ruthless tyrant.
Yet, inside the hotel, little changes. It’s in the communists’ interests to allow the business to continue to operate as a luxury establishment in order to keep an eye on its guests and to demonstrate to foreigners that everything is tickety-boo in the new Russia. There’s still fillet of sole for lunch and Châteauneuf-du-Pape in the cellar and a string quartet playing Rachmaninoff in the restaurant.
Adapted from Amor Towles’s bestselling 2016 novel of the same name, A Gentleman in Moscow has the feel of a flagship Sunday night BBC series of yesteryear. With a stylish title sequence inspired by Russian avant-garde art of the period, it’s a character-driven drama that unfolds at a leisurely pace. Incident is sparingly measured out, at least in the early episodes. However, it never feels slow.
McGregor’s finely-tuned, light-touch performance is mesmerising and viewers will be every bit as charmed by Rostov as his associates are. Only occasionally does the actor allow us to see that the Count’s twinkly charisma requires real effort to maintain in the face of the destruction of everything he loves about his country.
In a less assured drama, it might be limiting to have almost all of the action restricted to the hotel but the Metropol is so sumptuously realised by the set designers that it never feels confining. The lobby, the restaurants, the kitchens, the rooms and hidden service passageways, the roof: each different setting has its own ambience.
As the eight-episode series progresses, the brutality and madness of the Soviet regime becomes more and more evident and the stakes for Rostov and those he loves become higher and higher.
By its end, A Gentleman in Moscow develops real emotional heft I had not expected. When the time finally came to check out of the Metropol, I was sorry to leave.
‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ is streaming on Paramount+.
